Ripley Under Water Read Online Free PDF Page B

greenhouse and talking about the new rose spray (was Henri listening?), Henri took a fork from just inside the greenhouse and began to attack the compost. He was so tall, so strong, Tom was loath to stop him. Henri did know how to handle compost, because he understood what it was for.
    “Oui, m’sieur,” Henri murmured now and then, in a gentle voice.
    “And—well—I mentioned the roses. No spots at the moment. Now—just to make things look nice—the laurel row—with the clippers.” Henri did not need the ladder as Tom did, barely, if he tackled the sides near the top. Tom let the top grow any old way, straight up, as to flatten it by trimming would give the look of a formal hedge.
    With envy, Tom watched Henri push the wire basket with his left hand, and with his right use the fork to rake out excellent-looking dark compost from the bottom. “Oh, great! Tres bien!” When Tom tried to push that wire basket, it seemed to have taken root.
    “C’est vraiment bon,” Henri confirmed.
    Then the seedlings in the greenhouse, and some geraniums there. They would need watering. Henri clumped about on the wooden slatted floor, nodding his understanding. Henri knew where the key to the greenhouse was, under a round rock behind the greenhouse. Tom locked it only when he and Heloise were not in residence in the main house. Even Henri’s scuffed brown brogues looked of van Gogh’s time, with soles nearly an inch thick and uppers that came above the ankle. Heirlooms? Tom wondered. Henri was a walking anachronism.
    “We’ll be gone at least two weeks,” Tom said. “But Madame Annette will be here the whole time.”
    A few more details, and Tom considered Henri sufficiently briefed. A little money would not be amiss, so Tom pulled his wallet from a back pocket and gave Henri two hundred-franc bills.
    “Here’s to start with, Henri. And you keep track,” he added. Tom was ready to return to the house, but Henri showed no sign of departing. Henri was always that way, drifting around the edges, picking up a fallen twig or tossing a stone to one side before he finally sloped off without a word. “Au revoir, Henri!” Tom turned and walked toward his house. When he looked back, Henri was apparently going to give the compost another whack of some kind with the fork.
    Tom went upstairs, washed his hands in his bathroom, and relaxed in his armchair with a couple of brochures on Morocco. The ten or twelve photographs showed a blue mosaic interior of a mosque, five cannons lined up at a cliffs edge, a market with brightly colored striped blankets hanging, a blond tourist in the scantiest of bikinis spreading a pink towel on yellow sand. The map of Tangier on the other side of the brochure was schematic and clear in blue and dark blue, the beach in yellow and the port a pair of curves extending protectively into the Mediterranean or the Strait. Tom looked for the Rue de la Liberte, where the Hotel El Minzah was, and it seemed to be within walking distance of the Grand Socco, or big market.
    The telephone rang. Tom had a phone by his bed. “I’ll get it!” Tom shouted down the stairs to Heloise, who had been practicing her Schubert on the harpsichord. “Hello?”
    “Hi, Tom. Reeves here,” said Reeves Minot on a clear connection.
    “You in Hamburg?”
    “Sure am. I think—well, Heloise probably told you I called before.”
    “Yes, she did. Is everything all right?”
    “Oh, yes,” said Reeves in a calm and reassuring voice. “Just that—I’d like to mail something to you, small as a cassette. In fact—”
    It is a cassette, Tom was thinking.
    “And it’s not explosive,” Reeves went on. “If you could hold it for about five days, and then mail it to an address which will be enclosed in the envelope it’s coming in—“
    Tom hesitated, a bit annoyed, yet knowing he would oblige, because Reeves did him favors when he needed favors—a new passport for someone, shelter for the night in Reeves’s big apartment.